


All our ashes

by IsalaVanDiest



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, Minor Arya Stark/Gendry Waters, Rebuilding, Slow Burn, canon compliant up to 8.05, ish, time heals
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-09
Updated: 2020-03-16
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:54:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22639621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IsalaVanDiest/pseuds/IsalaVanDiest
Summary: [Post 8.05] The Starks in Winterfell, afterwards. A story about rebuilding, healing, and finding a reason to go on. No matter how long it takes."The heart always wants more than it has, Sansa finds."
Relationships: Arya Stark & Sansa Stark, Jon Snow/Sansa Stark
Comments: 17
Kudos: 82





	1. I. Small hollow birds

**Author's Note:**

> This is canon-compliant-ish up to 8.05 and takes it from there (as far as this is concerned, none of 8.06 has happened). There are some 'missing scenes' from previous episodes and some of these elide and add non-canonical elements to provide insight and explanations as to why the characters have chosen what they chose. Hence, only compliant-ish.

The Arya who comes back is a broken creature, hollow like a bird’s bone, who needs to be petted and bathed, soothed and tucked into bed, a hand through her hair until her eyes close. Sansa curls around her sister’s body like a shell, stroking her back throughout the night as if she were a pet, listening to her breathe. A few short weeks ago Arya was the fearless hero of Winterfell, the saviour of mankind. Now she is someone Sansa struggles to recognise: a frightened, lonely thing who huddles in the middle of their mother’s wide bed and talks of ashes and blood and blackened bodies, melted bones and scorched stones in what had once been the great city of the Seven Kingdoms. 

If Arya is unrecognisable, the Jon who returns in the days that follow is the walking dead, an empty void where his eyes were, held together by dust and grime and the bloody soles of his feet from where he walked all the way back to Winterfell. It was the first of their reunions where he did not see her, did not look at her, just walked past her and her staring people, stumbling inside where he was swallowed up in an instant. A castle-wide search could not yield him to her. Sansda found him herself, late at night, while wandering Winterfell alone, exhausted and cold. He was asleep in the crypts, curled up at Lyanna’s statue like a dog. Sansa touched his hair, saw he was breathing, and let him be alone.

She would give anything to make her pack whole. But for now she only has the knowledge that they are alive, and it is precious, everything she wanted, and still not enough.

The heart always wants more than it has, she finds.

The story of what they saw comes in ebbs, small snatched stretches. Bran tells her most of it, in the end, weaving the bits that others have given her together. The city where she was held prisoner is no more. The walkway from which she gazed up at her father’s severed head and dreamed of killing princes has been burnt. The passages she fled through in terror, men at her heels, are rubble. The city is ash and splintered stones and the scream of the dragon which flies ceaselessly overhead. 

Sansa cannot find it in her heart to mourn for King’s Landing’s smooth white and red buildings, the stones raised by generations of tyrant kings, nor the Iron Throne itself, which did not escape the damage of dragonfire and has become no more than a twisted lump of metal. Let the Mother of Dragons sit on that in the hard years to come.

In the weeks that follow, people pour into the North. They think it’s untouchable, safe from the reach of a Night’s King and a Queen of Ashes they can’t defy. Sansa finds it hard to tell them it is not true, to send them away, although their presence will be hard on her, and her stores. Instead she gives these southern refugees the North’s shelter, and sends a food convoy south, sending news of it to Tyrion Lannister, avoiding any requirement to write directly to the queen herself. Sansa does not know what she would say. She does not think she has it in her to write all those titles.

She might have it in her to beg, though.  _ Come back. Fix Jon. Make him better, and the North will be yours _ . 

She cannot trust herself not to do it, if she wrote to Daenerys directly. 

So instead Sansa appoints new advisors. She draws up plans to populate the Gift. She organises her army to stave off the raiders and bandits and even some of the Wildlings -  _ Free Folk _ , she reminds herself - venturing further south than they ever have, groups who have no loyalty to Jon or the Starks and no intention of living by her laws. It is not really the respite she thought she would find once safe at home, but it floods her veins and her heart and she feels full, nourished, although she can eat but little.

Bran is retreating. He spends most of his time in the godswood. Sometimes Sansa can urge him into her council, where he might speak for moments at a time. “Even if I leave you, I won’t really leave you,” he tells her, once, and he says nothing more when she weeps at his knees. He was her little brother once. She remembers the day he was born, peeping at him in their mother’s arms. He had lots of hair, even as a tiny baby, soft and fine between her curious fingers. She remembers holding his hand when they walked, and once helping the others hold him down so that they could tickle him in turn, while he shrieked in delight. When it was her turn she’d instead blown a raspberry on his soft boy’s stomach. That little boy is gone. It does not feel worth it.

At night she visits Jon in the crypts where he sleeps, as if she had not offered him countless other places. She knows why he stays here, knows that he wishes he were here forever, truly at rest, buried among all the Starks in stone, one of them at last. A part of him already belongs to them. But Sansa visits him every night with the thin meagre gruel and the coarse bread which is the only thing their stores are stretching to and which is meant to coax him back to life, as if any man was ever inspired to live by turnip broth. He does eat, however, despite his longing to die, even if sometimes she has to crumble the bread and moisten it and feed him from her fingers, pressing them to his lips, bite by bite. “Like a little bird,” she whispers to him, once. She knows she would do anything if it would bring him back. She watches him eat and kisses his brow and leaves him be.

Arya, too: Sansa tries to coax her from their mother’s room with any gift she can think of, presents she would never have dreamed of giving her sister when they were children: a new sword, proper armour, a shield; new clean silk underthings, too, and a feast, a proper one, with grapes imported at unimaginable expense and honey cakes baked with real smooth white flour. It sometimes works, and when it does Arya unfurls not like a flower but like an eagle, spreading its wings. A hunting creature.

But sometimes it doesn’t work, and when it doesn’t, Arya likes to stay in their darkened chamber, silent and large-eyed, and let Sansa sing to her and braid her hair. It is everything Sansa wanted from her sister when she was a child. She weeps bitter tears over it now. Some wishes shouldn’t come true.


	2. II: Wild, beautiful creatures

From her city of smoke, her ravaged country, Queen Daenerys Targaryen, first of her name, sends thanks for the North’s gift of food, a blessing in winter’s cold heart. Her message is grateful. Sansa notices - her council notices - that the queen does not use the word tribute.

Sansa thinks of the hungry people in King’s Landing, how they tore the High Septon apart, ripping arms from torso as easily as ripping apart a doll. Their hatred and their fear gave them the strength to do it. No man can be at peace, who watches his children starve. Sansa knows these things now. The people of King’s Landing had already known what it looked like, when people died. 

She thinks of how the crowds cheered when her father’s head came off. Tyrion had said, in a scrap of letter he’d sent, a small private coda to the queen’s message, that they’d done the same when Cersei had murdered Daenerys’ advisor, the golden woman with her dark, soft eyes, who had loved her queen.

Sansa imagines Missandei’s death, what it would have been like to watch it happen. She remembers seeing the sword flash at her father’s neck, and the spurt of blood, and then nothing but black. Sansa thinks about how she was thrown to the ground, held down, what could have happened in that alleyway that stank of straw and horse dung. She thinks of it all and she breathes deep to steady herself. 

Sansa thinks of crowds, cheering. She sends another food convoy.

One evening she is sitting cross-legged on the floor of her mother’s chamber, eating soup with Arya, and Jon walks in. He has not knocked, and Brienne has not warned them. Sansa pretends not to be surprised, nor even especially pleased. She just passes him a bowlful of their soup, like it is unremarkable that he should come here to be welcome and to eat his supper with his family. Jon and Arya stare at each other while Sansa busies herself with the food, trying not to watch their reunion. Sansa has passed on news about one to the other, but neither sought each other out, all this time. It shows how bad things have been for them. They were there at the same time, even if not together. They saw what the other saw, even if from different places. They always knew things about one another that the other Stark children didn’t - they always understood each other. Now they have a new thing to bind them, forged in those flames that were so hot they flickered white and made the whole air shimmer.

They eat in silence. Jon’s hair is matted and the shadows under his eyes are purple and puffy, as dark as plums. There is dirt in thick black crescents under his nails. He hasn’t bathed in all the time.

But after that he comes to eat with them in their chambers at night, though he will not join them if either of them eat in the hall. He allows Sansa to give him his old bedchamber, and new sets of clothes which she sews herself. She prays with each stitch, for forgiveness, yes - but also understanding. Jon bathes, spending long hours in his steaming bath, according to the servants Sansa sends to tend him. She spares no fuel for Jon’s hot water, even though she knows it is an indulgence. Her guilt spurs her into making a gift of extra firewood to the smallfolk crowding Wintertown, and she’s annoyed, and snaps at Jon at supper. To her surprise, he not only stays, but turns to her, eyes crinkling as if, somewhere deep inside, a smile might be hiding. 

One day he’s even managed to trim his beard. Another day, his nails are trimmed. And another, Sansa cuts his hair.

There are servants who could do this, and probably better than her. But she suggests it on impulse, as she steps briefly into his chamber when passing by on one of her countless chores. “You look well, but your hair. It needs cutting. I’ll do it for you later.”

It’s a surprise when he actually does come to her solar later, in the afternoon when she rests a while. Arya is down at the stables, or the forge, where she sometimes ventures. Jon sits where she was sitting, and Sansa picks up her sharpest scissors, running her fingers through his dark, shaggy curls, surprisingly soft despite their unkempt state. She snips carefully, cradling the side of his head, tilting it from side to side to gain access. She brushes his neck with her thumb, runs her fingers over his skull, and knows he is here. When she is finished he leans against her, eyes closed, and she takes a long time to brush the hair from his shoulders. 

He stands to look at her work in his glass - it’s not the most even job, to be sure, but it will do - and Sansa swallows, hard. He is wearing a shirt she made him, grey, embroidered with white direwolves with red, flashing eyes. Jon has become so thin, and the shirt is a little too big on him. It makes him look younger, a boy swimming in his tunic. 

Without knowing she will do it, she is holding on to him, and then weeping into his shoulder; he holds her back, hands around her shoulders, down her back, tangling in her loose hair. It is hard to let go of him, and his hands linger: a fistful of hair, sweeping over her arms. It’s hard for him, too. It’s a relief to know they still share this affinity of touch, like they did before at Castle Black, at Winterfell - before. A hand on his arm, to make him listen to her. Or his on her shoulder, to point something out to her. His hand taking hers to place her fingertip at the right point on a rolled-out map, so they could trace routes and roads, pressing down a moment after she’d found the mark. 

Even so, he still rarely speaks, nor does he venture far from his chambers, or hers. She is sure many in the North do not even know he is here at Winterfell. She does not know if Daenerys knows it, or what she would do if she found out. She won’t tell anyone. He can be hers - hers and Arya’s - alone for a while longer. 

One day, Sansa gives Arya the finest gift of all: a new horse, white as flame. The horse her sister had rode in through the gates of Winterfell from the ashes of King’s Landing had died the moment she stepped into the castle’s walls, collapsing with a shake as Arya dismounted. Arya - the girl who always rode astride, harder and fiercer and more daring than even Robb - has not ridden since. But she cannot resist the wild beauty of this creature, whose price Sansa refused to haggle over. From Winterfell’s walkways, she watches her sister and the horse move together as one. The wind catches Arya’s hair and a grin flashes from her, making her look a girl again.. 

Sansa is aware when Jon joins her. She knows his tread, how it creaks on the wooden boards. She watches his hands hold on to the wooden rails. She looks down at his neat, patched boots. She finds herself unable to look at his face. 

“It was a good idea,” he tells her, and the tears pulse at her eyes at the sound of his voice, rough and out of use. 

She steadies her hand on the wooden bannister, gripping it tight to make sure her voice will not falter, will not give anything away, will convey nothing but strength. “I know,” she says.


End file.
